| EVENT THIS WEEK! |
| Songs of Innocence and of ExperienceWednesday 2 October, 19:00-21:00 St Bartholomew the Great, 57 West Smithfield, London EC1A 9DS £10, £8 concessions (plus Eventbrite booking fee) Please choose Concession if you are a member of the Blake Society |
 The Blake Society and St Bartholomew present an evening of music and talks focussing on Blake’s timeless poems and pictures, with Katy Carr and Stephen Pritchard.Join us in this spectacular setting to explore Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Internationally acclaimed singer and musician, Katy Carr will join the Secretary of the Blake Society, Stephen Pritchard, to explore Blake’s deceptively simple poems and exquisite artwork, some copies of which were hand-coloured by Catherine Blake. These unique works of art will be projected, sung and their beauty and profundity celebrated in words and song. Whether you know the poems well, or they are entirely new to you, this combined musical and analytical exploration of text and image will offer a unique opportunity to experience a work still completely relevant to our times- and to what it means to be human. |
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| Katy Carr is an award-winning, independent British singer songwriter with Polish roots. She is an aviator and multi-instrumentalist: ukulele, banjolele, piano and vintage keyboard. Katy has released six albums of songs, inspired by untold stories from history and has performed to audiences across the UK, US and Europe. She is delighted to be debuting her self-penned vocal melodies of William Blake’s collection of Songs of Innocence and of Experience in partnership with the Blake Society. Katy is currently planning a double album of Blake’s works. |
 Stephen Pritchard is Secretary of the Blake Society. He studied English at Exeter College, Oxford, and whilst researching for a DPhil on William Blake, taught and ran classes for graduates and undergraduates. Stephen co-founded the WOMAD Festival in 1982 with Peter Gabriel. He has recently created and directed a new multimedia play, Albion, Awake! about William and Catherine’s Blake’s life and work. |
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| NEW FROM GLOBAL BLAKE Blake Symposium – Musical Afterlives A free, one-day, online symposium from the Global Blake Network exploring musical settings of Blake’s poetry and his inspiration & classical and popular artists.Date: 4 November, 2024 online via Zoom. Admission: Free Keynote Speaker: Barry Miles |
 William Blake is one of the most celebrated English-language poets set to music, having inspired a myriad of renderings, ranging from Hubert Parry’s classical hymn Jerusalem (1916) to Patti Smith’s panegyric In My Blakean Year (2004). Although the earliest setting dates back to 1863, it was only in the 1920s that Blake’s reception in music started to increase more substantially. Propelled by the development of his scholarship, Blake became a favourite for classical composers, captivating the likes of Vaughan Williams, John Ireland and Benjamin Britten. In the sixties new musical genres emerged, with folk settings by the Beat poet and musician Ed Sanders in 1965, followed by Allen Ginsberg in 1970. A constellation of popular musicians and performers from the sixties and seventies such as Bob Dylan, The Doors and Van Morrison also found an abundant source of inspiration in his poetic and visual production. The aim of this symposium is to present a comprehensive discussion of Blake’s reception in music in order to understand not only the genesis and motivations of the phenomenon, but also its endurance in the digital age, when multimedia and intermediality play a central role in the dissemination of literature. It also encompasses the articulation of word, sound and image in the appropriation of his work, which ranges from album covers and posters to music settings. |